CS101 Midterm #1 Exam Topics

The midterm exam is closed book and closed notes.  Calculators are not allowed.  However, you may bring a "cheat sheet" consisting of one page of notes (front and back).  The best way to study for the test is to understand your homework questions and be able to answer the questions at the end of the chapters in the book.

Key Terms

• You should know all the key terms listed at the back of all the chapters covered (1-3, 5)

Data Representation

• Concept that data can represent many things (sound, instruction, number, picture, text)
• How text is stored (ASCII, UNICODE)
• Be able to represent and convert between decimal, unsigned binary, hex, octal, two's complement, and sign magnitude
• Negative number representation using S/M and two's complement
• Be able to convert a floating point number from decimal to IEEE 754 and vice versa

Computer Arithmetic

• Know how to add and subtract numbers using two's complement representation
• Concepts of carry and overflow

Computer Architecture

• Basic components of a computer (e.g. disk, primary memory, secondary memory, input units, output units)
• Memory and memory addressing
• Role of the data, address, and control bus
• Components of the CPU
• Registers
• ALU
• Control Unit
• Instruction Cycle, what it is
• Ways to increase CPU performance
• Changing the instruction set
• Cache
• Pipelining
• Increase clock rate
• Parallel processing

History of computing

Stuff not on the test

• Writing programs in machine code
• One's complement
• BCD